If you own a business and have a website, search engine optimization (SEO) will help your site get seen by more customers. SEO helps your site rank higher in the search engine results for Google and Bing. Here are a few basic SEO tips which can help make your SEO more effective. Good SEO includes different methods for increasing the likelihood your site coming up higher up in the list presented to searching visitors. When this happens, you generally receive more traffic to your website. Intensive SEO can mean an entire restructuring of your site. However, there are a few simple things you can do yourself to increase your site’s search engine ranking.

Know Where You Stand

There is no way to know for certain that your SEO techniques are effective unless you know where you stand in the search engine results before you start. There are online tools such as Google toolbar and Alexa which allow you to monitor your site’s page rank. It is also important to track the search terms or keywords your visitors are using to reach your site and where they care coming from.

Good Keywords – possible, usable and related

Another important part of effective SEO is choosing the right keywords. Keywords are strategically placed throughout the content on your site, as well as in headlines, URLs, and image names. The two most important places to insert keywords are in the page header and the title tag. When you are considering which keywords to use, think about the search terms that a customer would use to find information on the topic – business for sale vs business to sell – for example. They mean the same but one is an owner looking to list, vs someone looking to buy.

One caution, do not overuse a particular keyword within your content. This is called keyword stuffing and the search engines may penalize your site in their rankings.

Internal Links

One of the most basic SEO strategies is to include internal links within your site content. This is one of the easiest ways to boost traffic. Always link back to archived content when you create new content. Also, remember to make any anchor text relevant and do not use too man links.

A Sitemap

Another basic SEO strategy is to add a sitemap to your website. This is a page on your site that lists all the pages and links to them. Adding a sitemap makes it easier for the search engine spiders to search your site. It makes no sense to people or users, but it essential to the robotic spiders crawling the site. It seems a total waste of time, but is actually important. They say.

Put the keyword in the url

An oldie, but goodie: use keywords in your URLs and to make them short and to the point. Create URLs that are easy to understand and remember.

NO FLASH!

Sadly, sites that look really sharp with Flash and all sort of clever animations, are slow to load and that hurts your Many sites add flash to their site, this does not help your site’s SEO. Plus, the big problem with adding flash to your site is that there is no way to link to an individual page.

Alt Tags

The search engine spiders search only the text on your website, not the images. This is why it is important to make use of any space or association with an image to add another relevant piece of information, or the keyword itself. Even naming the image is effective if you can get that name to include keywords. Do this for for each image on your site. If you include an ALT tag after each image name, you can also include a description.

Conclusion

When you want your website to grow and attract more visitors, good SEO is an important first step. Even basic SEO tips can make a difference in helping your site’s ranking in the search engine results. The higher up you are in the list, the more visitors you get. Hence, SEO is a Good Thing. 🙂

There are tools for everything online. SEO is as a widely played sport, with many amateur and professional leagues as tennis, soccer or golf. Some are free, and most of those are better when you pay for the premium “full” version. So, what can you do yourself? If you are the one writing content for your website, then you can do a lot. If you are outsourcing all of your writing, then you will have to do careful editing.

What are the search engines looking for?

Good content. Always good content… and many pundits will say over and over again, your best content. This is like, Ina Garten’s recipes always asking for “good olive oil”. What’s good enough? She means perhaps the best you can afford? In SEO Tips terms we mean, your own thoughts. Or the closest to it. No spun articles, no copied stuff from someone else. It’s ok to be inspired by other folks’ blog posts or articles. And it’s okay to curate content so long as you top and tail the piece with your own thoughts. If you don’t have any…at least share an application. Why is this particular point of view interesting or important?

Today, the search engines are looking for relevance and authority. Why should anyone listen to your opinion, what are your credentials, and how can you be trusted? Your social signal now becomes a relevant factor. Because if other people are prepared to know you, then you must be a decent person. And that also means, how much is your stuff shared.

How much do you look out for your customer, and what do they say about you? i.e. testimonials, and recommendations. in the same way that we all rush to Facebook, and Instagram to rave about a new restaurant, film or experience, so too with businesses and professionals. If you aren’t provoking testimonials naturally, you might ask for them. And you might just want to spend a little time considering what you offer and how you could wow your customers even more so that that might want to rush to social media to tell someone about you.

The vote of confidence. With so many people online, the search engines need a point of differentiation. Who talks about you and how nicely they do so become like a vote of confidence for Google and other search engines. They can be safe ranking you for your desired search term if generally people agree you’re good. It keeps their integrity intact too. You can imagine that, right? But it is also this factor of judgement that makes this game of SEO quite so difficult to play.

SEO Judgement of Value and Whose Opinion Counts The Most?

When the search engines… and in the United States, we are almost always talking about Google… there are a few factors that go into the judgement of whose site is more relevant and authoritative than others. The logic is clever, when you consider that all Google is trying to do is assess whose site is more relevant and useful for a certain keyword phrase.

Page Load Speed – if the thing takes 40 seconds to load, the searcher has lost patience and gone on to the next one on the list. So, if your page speed is slow – you get a negative in the algorithm. Consider using any of these 3 and work your way through the recommendations

http://tools.pingdom.com/

https://gtmetrix.com/

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Bounce Rate – how long do people stay on your site? If they leave quickly, called a bounce, then your site would appear to not be terribly compelling, right? It’s a logical assumption. You can find this number in your Google Analytics account. The higher the number the worse off your site is. If your bounce rate is 84%, it means that 84% of the people visiting your site clicked off without visiting a second page. This may be what you want – all your visitors want is your address or phone number. Usually, it is better if someone explores your site a bit more. A big chance here is MOBILE SITES.

because it’s not easy to click onto other pages from the menu bar, the tendency in 2016 is to make front pages longer. Many sites will put everything on the front page or landing page so that the visitor doesn’t have to click further. This should make bounce rate matter less.. in time.

For now, add larger buttons to click in for more info, as an alternative to scrolling down.

Moz.com is the best tool for checking your domain authority. Under their free tools section, check Open Site Explorer.